Ask someone for advice about how to break a bad habit and watch their eyes LIGHT UP.
Immediately, they'll say, Oh! You should try this new app! or, You should definitely read this book, or overwhelm you with a long list of tips that worked for me! The thing is, we already KNOW what we should do. But there's more to changing a habit than learning more information.
Maybe you want to stop procrastinating, eating junk food, or spending money. Is it just the information you need?
For the most part, we already know all the conventional advice:
All these "tips" sound logical. They sound like they should work. And yet the tips alone doesn't lead to radical change.
What we actually need is a system that guarantees we follow through on our goals.
When we can't seem to follow through on our goals and break old habits, a lot us needlessly beat ourselves up. We think "well, if I just try harder" or "if I stop being so lazy" then I could make a change.
And when we don't follow through, we feel guilty. Why do we do this? Guilt is the least productive emotion. It doesn't help us move forward. It just makes us feel bad.
Let's drop the guilt. It's not our fault. We're not weak or incapable of change. If we're not losing weight, not spending quality (distraction-free) time with our families, or not doing anything else we want life, it's usually because we don't understand how to design our habits correctly.
So before moving on to the next section, decide that for at least the next week, you'll try to catch yourself whenever you use "guilty" language. Then, instead of beating yourself up, slightly alter your negative language into something more positive and productive.
Like this:
Once you internalize this, you make changes easier on yourself and a lot more FUN.
Every habit has three components:
The reward is how our brains actually learn to want a particular behavior in the future. We put 2-and-2 together and equate the pleasure of a cup of coffee with getting out of bed.
That's how people pick up bad habits, like smoking, but it's also how people stick to good habits like exercising. They link a cue and routine to a reward.
For decades people focused exclusively on changing the behavior, the routine itself.
But we now know that cues and rewards are actually the most important parts of making a habit stick. If you get the cues and rewards right, the routines form by default.
That's why, for example, eating more chocolate could help you exercise more.
Yes, you read that right: Research has shown that eating more chocolate can help you exercise more.
Here's why: Eating chocolate at the end of a workout is a simple way to ignite the reward centers in your brain and cement the good feelings that are required for a habit to take root.
It sounds contradictory (that eating chocolate can help you exercise more), but it's true.
I recently sat down with Charles Duhigg, author of the book The Power of Habit (arguably the best book on behavioral change in modern times), to talk about how to create new habits.
And in this part of our chat, he explains just how important rewards can be to break a bad habit (even something random like eating chocolate to workout more) and how you can choose your own rewards to make new habits stick.
Your turn to break that bad habit: What's habit do you want to start? What will you do to reward yourself for taking action on this? It's important that you plan this in advance. For example, you don't want to end your workout, leave in a rush and not be able to reward yourself with a smoothie or a relaxing shower. You want to ensure that you can give yourself a reward to make sure the behavior sticks.
Here are some sample rewards you might use:
The reward can be anything you choose, as long as you're giving yourself something you genuinely enjoy.
It's very hard to simply break a bad habit. That's because we're still getting whatever cue was telling us to do the bad habit in the first place, and we're wired to know the bad habit will give us an immediate reward.
We're much more likely to be successful if we change a bad habit into a better behavior.
Here's an common example: A lot of us tend to look for something sweet to eat right after lunch. We hit the vending machine for chocolates, cookies, or some other sweet to fix our craving.
Because, yes, sweets and desserts taste good, but a habit is much more complicated than that.
It's not just the sweet that's creating our behavior. There's a whole series of reasons that surround it.
Instead of just giving up the sweets, maybe we could try getting up from our desk and eating an apple instead. Or maybe, if it's the energy from the sugar that we're craving, a cup of coffee will do the trick.
The important thing to note is that we're not stopping cold turkey. Instead, we're replacing a "bad habit" with a new, better one.
Decide what your replacement habit will be and commit by writing it down. Any time your old behavioral pattern pops up, do this habit instead.
Here are some ideas to get you started:
Even the best laid plans sometimes fail. That's life. When we're trying to form a new habit, interruptions to our new routine can break the cue-routine-reward cycle.
But these setbacks don't have to knock us permanently off course. Often, we can get back on track with some very simple fixes.
Here's how to KEEP a habit going once you've created it (in less than 3-minutes).
What about you? Once you start your new habit, how will you keep doing it? It's important to plan ahead for this so if your momentum temporarily stops, you don't get permanently off track.
Some things you could do:
Where can you start?
I asked some of the world's top experts -- people like Neil Patel, Noah Kagan, BJ Fogg and Josh Kaufman -- to share some of the life-changing habits and tests they've created in their own lives.
You can implement most of these in just a few minutes.
I put them together in this free guide for you.
The Ultimate Guide to Habits
It covers everything from habits on how to be more productive, to getting into better shape, to generating explosive growth in your business and career.
Grab your free copy so you can start building massively successful habits into your own life.